Email Delivery and Daily Email Digest Option

[OpenMind]

Hello all, 

First off, I have to congratulate you on the new version 5! It's a really slick piece of software. I administer a couple of Yahoo groups where the options are next to nothing, so it's nice to see all of these features. 

That said, I find a crucial feature missing from the site: email delivery. 

Whenever someone finds one of my existing forums in the Yahoo groups directory, they must sign up as a member of the forum if they want to view and respond to messages. Aside from cataloguing a user base, this process accomplishes several things:

1) It prompts users to identify why they want to join the forum in under 200 characters, which allows me to see if they are appropriate, and potentially assign them to a member group.
2) It allows the user to select if they want individual emails, daily digest, or web-based forum option. 

Yesterday, I invited someone to join my forum on proboards, and they posted a message to the forum, but were not added as a member. While I realize I don't have a members only forum, I think it is important to prompt users the first time they post on a forum to ask if they want to join as a member. 

I can understand if someone is on many, many forums, that email delivery is not an efficient method. But MOST people on my Yahoo forums have selected individual emails as their preferred method of delivery. In fact, approximately 90% of my users use email as their preferred method--only four people out of 50 chose to use the web-based version of the forum and opted out of email delivery.

So that said, I am wondering if this is an option, or if it will be available in the future? Since everyone checks their email on a daily basis (often times more), users would be forced to interact with forum content in the email inbox on a more consistent, more timely basis. Without email delivery, a new user is forced to return to the Proboards site to check a forum's activity. In the case of a new, relatively inactive forum, this might happen in a week, a month, or never again. 

I am hoping this is a feature that might be considered for Proboards. Your forums have every feature I need... except for this. 

Thanks for your consideration,
Jonathan

[Ryan Roos]

Hi OpenMind,

You have many options available to you to accomplish the goals you just described.

If you are concerned with guests posting and not becoming members you can disable guest posting on your forum. Admin > Settings > General Settings

If you want people to tell you why they should be allowed to join in 200 characters or less (its more actually, but you get the point) you can restrict registration and require them to tell you why they should be able to join. Admin > Settings > General Settings

You can review every member if you want and then make a decision and even place them in a member groups of your choice just like you described.

Users can set up their email notifications themselves already. Profile > Edit Profile > Notifications

We don't have a daily digest feature yet. I say 'yet' because it's already on our list of future ideas. Even though that doesn't quite exist yet there are numerous ways to track updates on the forums you are a member on. The easiest way is to go to proboards.com while you're logged in. The forum dashboard gives you a breakdown of whats going on and lets you jump straight into any forum account.

When you say web-based forum option that's what this is. I realize that the last 2 things (emails and daily digests) might be alternatives to the forum itself on Yahoo groups, but here the forum is the constant focus and those other two things are merely options for bringing you back to the forum.

The person you invited to your forum was able to post right away because you have guest posting turned on. However you don't have to disable it entirely. If you want you can set it so most of the board or categories on your forum require members, but you could leave one board for guests to ask questions or say hello. You can really set up your forum however you wish.

As I said before email notification is up to the member and it does exist already. And it's designed in such a way that it brings people back to the forum. If the notification contains enough content a 'read more...' link appears bring people back.

So, to sum it all up. Everything you requested either already exists in some way or another or is on our list for the future. If you have any other questions feel free to ask.

Thank you.


Edit: Also don't forget you have plugins at your disposal. Something like a message that pops up at guest that asks them to join sounds like a great idea for one.

[OpenMind]

Apr 12, 2013 7:09:11 GMT -8 Ryan Roos said:

Hi Ryan,

Thanks for the reply First off, this quoting system seems great, but it never allows me to put a space at the beginning of the quote, so now it looks like my quote is in your quote. I realize I can edit this in BBCode, but seems like it should be added to the default? 

If you are concerned with guests posting and not becoming members you can disable guest posting on your forum. Admin > Settings > General Settings

I didn't realize the person was posting as a guest. Since it displayed her actual name on the forum, I figured she had registered on the forum, so that was my confusion. Perhaps you might put a notifier underneath a guest's name to indicate their guest status. 

You can review every member if you want and then make a decision and even place them in a member groups of your choice just like you described.

This is different than how I am envisioning my forum, and would duplicate a lot of the work. 

One of my forums is devoted to occupational therapy, and so my goal is to attract OTs to the forum. Within the field of OT, there are also Certified Occupational Therapy Assistants, Professors of OT, and professors of COTAs, as well as OT PhD students, Master's degree-seeking students, and COTA students. In addition, there are many universities throughout the world, and having to go through my forum to assign each user to a university group, a professional group (OT or COTA), and a country group would waste a great deal of time. In addition, if they are a professor, student, or alumnus of a university, I will have to assign them to that additional group. Because I might need to communicate to one specific group (academia at Michigan College, which would send a message only to OT/COTA students and professors), right now I would have to devote a great deal of time assigning new members to the various groups. 

I mentioned this idea in another thread, but my vision is to have the process of assigning groups be an automated part of the signup process. Groups and subgroups could be setup by the group administrator, and this can be an optional part of the signup process. So, if I wanted to assign people to a group of professions, I could simply go to the administration section on groups and check off various professions/titles that I want to include as part of the groups, which would be required or optional to check off during the signup process. 

When I send an invite to professors at a university, I could send them a link that would direct them to a page where their group and permissions have already been set to moderator, and all they would have to do is register. I would provide them with a separate link to share with their students that would assign new users to the student group at their university with the permissions set appropriately. 

The other idea I mentioned is the ability to appoint administrators to various subtopics within my forum, so that a professor or teaching assistant for a professor could be in charge of not only moderating a section, but also administering all of the topics, sections, etc., but their power would be limited to that specific section. 

Users can set up their email notifications themselves already. Profile > Edit Profile > Notifications

This seems like a very important decision for new users to make. I would think this would be part of the signup process...? In the future when daily or weekly digests are an option, I would think this would be selected by default explaining its purpose, and the user could choose to uncheck this option. As I mentioned before, 80-90% of my users on Yahoo groups choose to have email delivery. 

We don't have a daily digest feature yet. I say 'yet' because it's already on our list of future ideas. Even though that doesn't quite exist yet there are numerous ways to track updates on the forums you are a member on. The easiest way is to go to proboards.com while you're logged in. The forum dashboard gives you a breakdown of whats going on and lets you jump straight into any forum account.

This is a good feature, but getting to it is not necessarily intuitive. I would think I could access a summary of my usage by clicking the "Message" menu, but it isn't listed there. Users don't know the dashboard exists unless they stumble upon it by typing the root domain or reading the help. This is especially true because my forum is hosted at boards.net. When I login there, it redirects me to proboards.com. Perhaps I should host my forum on proboards.com to avoid confusion?

In addition, what about those forums that upgrade to domain hosting? Would someone have the ability to see a forum dashboard while still remaining on the domain? So, for instance, if someone posted on several subforums within the main forum of occupational therapy, could they keep track of these messages through this tool without leaving the domain name?

Also don't forget you have plugins at your disposal. Something like a message that pops up at guest that asks them to join sounds like a great idea for one.

As a new user, I don't know what features would be programmable via plugins and which features would have to be changed by the staff, but thank you for the idea and all of your support.  

Jonathan

[Ryan Roos]

1) If you have a bug then report it in the bugs board. We fixed quotes over a year ago and haven't had any issues or reports of issues since. Be sure to include your browser and it's version in the bug report. It very likely is directly related to that.

2) Guests are allowed to enter a name so that they aren't all called guest. However, unless you've changed something their title text will say guest. If your friend says New Member than she did register.

3) You talk of automation, but in any scenario some human somewhere is going to need to place people in the appropriate groups. There is no detector. You mentioned having a checklist that you could run down and click the appropriate groups for a person and then accept their registration. That already exists, but you're doing it backwards. Accept their registration, jump to their profile and click into the Groups tab. Click away, adding them to all the appropriate groups from one big list. These things are already really streamlined. I could see in the future adding some sort of group sorter to the accept page and I will make a note of it in our features list. But until they are a member you can't add them to things anyway so try out the method I just explained.

4) The defaults are all forum notifications are on and emails are off. People have to opt into emails (except for the forum emails from the admin area which they have to opt out of). If you want to bring more attention to the notifications you can do that in a number of ways yourself. However that is not the primary focus. We have 13 years of testing and the faster the signup process is the more members will sign up. People don't want to sit there checking 28 check boxes trying to decide how to be notified. That being said, you can do whatever you need to do on your forum to get it the way you want. Use the Custom Pages feature to make a custom welcome page. Set it to be the post registration page and write a big welcome and explanation about notifications and your forum digest. Let them decide what to do then. We don't force people into things. We give them choices. How you want to guide them to those choices is up to you.

5) ProBoards.com is host to numerous domains. At the current time all of those are still ProBoards forums though (in the future we hope for others as well). I was telling you about the dashboard more for your personal use. Let members discover it themselves. There's a link in the bottom right hand corner on every page that takes them there. Also to clarify when I say a digest I mean we will someday consolidate the notifications emails into a single digest email that updates them with information that they want. It will probably have it's own section on the notification page so that people can customize their digests. This may or may not include a digest feature on the admin side that let's the staff add digest notes that go out with the digests. If you wanted to contact people with your own digest you could use the existing Email Members feature.

6) Pretty much any modification you could possibly want to make that isn't solely a color change is going to be possible via plugin. And even color changes too, but there are better ways. When in doubt request a plugin. The worst possible thing to happen is someone tells you it would work better as a template mod or they tell you how to do it without a plugin. But if it is a plugin idea than someone may make it for you and you simply need to instal the thing on your forum. Easy.

[OpenMind]

2) Guests are allowed to enter a name so that they aren't all called guest. However, unless you've changed something their title text will say guest. If your friend says New Member than she did register.

She was not listed as a new member, yet there is no mention of her being a guest:

occupationaltherapy.boards.net/thread/5/

3) You talk of automation, but in any scenario some human somewhere is going to need to place people in the appropriate groups. There is no detector. You mentioned having a checklist that you could run down and click the appropriate groups for a person and then accept their registration. That already exists, but you're doing it backwards. Accept their registration, jump to their profile and click into the Groups tab. Click away, adding them to all the appropriate groups from one big list. These things are already really streamlined. I could see in the future adding some sort of group sorter to the accept page and I will make a note of it in our features list. But until they are a member you can't add them to things anyway so try out the method I just explained.

Let me explain a bit better: I believe it would be better to allow new users to place themselves in the appropriate groups. I can't possibly know the necessary information about my users to sort them into groups until they tell me, so why not allow users to input crucial information about themselves during registration? As the system exists now, I will have to email new users to ask if they are an OT or an OT assistant, a student or a licensed therapist, in the US and in what city in order to assign them to the appropriate groups..

If I had the option to collect data during the registration process that would then place the user in the aforementioned various groups, or assign them various IDs that can then be specified by the admin in order to communicate with specific groups, this would be a much better way of organizing users.

4) The defaults are all forum notifications are on and emails are off. People have to opt into emails (except for the forum emails from the admin area which they have to opt out of). If you want to bring more attention to the notifications you can do that in a number of ways yourself. However that is not the primary focus. We have 13 years of testing and the faster the signup process is the more members will sign up. People don't want to sit there checking 28 check boxes trying to decide how to be notified. That being said, you can do whatever you need to do on your forum to get it the way you want. Use the Custom Pages feature to make a custom welcome page. Set it to be the post registration page and write a big welcome and explanation about notifications and your forum digest. Let them decide what to do then. We don't force people into things. We give them choices. How you want to guide them to those choices is up to you.

I understand there is an inverse correlation between how much information you collect and how many users sign up. What I'm asking for is three drop-down boxes during registration: One to tell me if they are an OT, COTA, OT student, COTA student or professor, one box to tell me their location, and one box to tell me which university they currently attend or graduated from.  



If you want to cater to groups with thousands of people, especially large professional groups and academia, I would think this feature would be sought after. But maybe I'm wrong, so obviously it's an idea that can be disregarded if I am in the minority.

[Ryan Roos]

Hi OpenMind

Okay well then there is some good news based on everything you just said.

Here's how you can achieve your goals with things that already exist.

You can't change our registration process, however you can already add to it. You will need to create a custom page. Set that custom page to be your Post Registration page. That will make it so that as soon as someone registers they will be spit out onto that page first thing. You can put whatever information you want to convey to them there. A big welcome, whatever. You could, if you wanted, collect information there as well. Add drop downs, make a form, do whatever you need to do. You can do anything with a custom page that you could do with a web page elsewhere online. The best part is this. Place a big button that says next at the bottom and link it to everyone's own group page. Next to that button tell them that they are going to be taken to their groups page next and that they need to join the group(s) they are supposed to be in. You are going to make all the groups you want and need and you're going to make them all open groups. An open group will appear on everyone groups page as a group that members are open to join. This already exists. All you have to do is get them to that page and they can do the rest just like you want.

I hope that solves all your problems. If you have any other questions, simply ask me here.

Thank you.

[OpenMind]

Thank you for the help. The idea about an open group is great, but the problem is that I will have more than 100 options for groups listed. Can I categorize groups into subgroups/pulldown menus so that all of the states and cities aren't displayed at once on the page?